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There was a lot of press hype about it, but global cooling wasn't widely accepted scientifically. The first paragraph of that Wikipedia article even says this.

One thing hasn't changed: the mainstream media's handling of science and technology was just as bad 40 years as it is now.

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"The first paragraph of that Wikipedia article even says this"

BZZZT. One thing you won't find on Wikipedia is honest coverage of climate science. "I was there" (back in the '70s) and it was taken seriously by many opinion makers and the like.

I hasten to point out that "opinion makers" and "scientists" are widely disjunct sets of individuals. (There's also a big difference between "taken seriously as a risk" and "taken seriously as the most probable outcome", and it's very easy to trip the first threshold without tripping the second. Even a 10% chance of, for instance, terrorists using nuclear weapons has to be taken extremely seriously even though it's highly improbable.)

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